The Internet is suffering from multiple effects of its rapid growth. Network
providers now find themselves in the uncomfortable position of deploying new
products and technologies into already-congested environments without adequate
tools to assess their performance. In this paper we present a diagnostic tool
that provides direct measurement of IP performance, including queue dynamics
at or beyond the onset of congestion. It uses a transport style sliding
window algorithm combined with ping or traceroute to sustain packet queues in
the network. It can directly measure such parameters as throughput, packet
loss rates and queue size as functions of packet and window sizes. Other
parameters, such as switching time per packet or per byte, can also be
derived. The measurements can be performed either in a test bed environment
(yielding the most accurate results), on single routers in situ in the
Internet, or along specific paths in the production Internet. We will
illustrate several measurement techniques.
Windowed ping: BibTex